I shelled out another $50 to get a wireless usb that I had hoped would allow me to use OpenBSD wirelessly. With my luck, I got another urtw0. I've spent more than 500 man hours trying to get this working. I know there's some little flag or something ridiculously simple to make it happen. Why people in this forum, not all the people, but some of them are so secretive befuddles me.

I know there's some little flag or something ridiculously simple to make it happen.

Maybe, maybe not. Wireless support is finicky at best. The technology & industry surrounding it is not yet mature -- especially when compared to Ethernet.

Quote:

Why people in this forum, not all the people, but some of them are so secretive befuddles me.

No one has all the answers. I also suspect that no one has a utrw(4) device, so no one can speak from direct experience. That leaves us to reading the manpages & searching the misc@ mailing list just like you should be doing yourself. Even the utrw(4) manpage states the following:

that should configure your wireless if. let me explain. urtw0 is your wireless usb, 10.0.0.1 -- just memorize it b/c as far as i know you use it all the time. netmask is the same memorize it b/c you use it all the time. wid is equivalent to ssid on an ethernet it's the name or id in our case a Borders coffee shop. wepmode, i still have work this out but it's for protecting your connection it's the encryption method. and wepkey is the password for that wireless network you're trying to get into.

then do:

Code:

sudo dhclient urtw0

you should get a connection ... if not look into your dhclient.conf in /etc and fiddle with it like so:

dhcp

that line above works best for me

dhcp NONE NONE NONE

that line has three NONE's after dhcp

and there are more, but this should get anyone started who's in the same boat as me.

Last edited by J65nko; 16th March 2010 at 11:29 PM.
Reason: [code] and [/code] taggification

I'm very happy with the RAlink 2501 usb wireless which uses the rum driver.
The one odd thing I have noticed is I either have to use 'sh /etc/netstart rum0' or have the device plugged in at boot. Using ifconfig to bring up the network followed by dhclient rum0 does not work.

Specifying the subnet mask as a hexidecimal value is fine. Examples in the urtw(4) manpage do the same.

A more fundamental problem tetrodozombie will have in the future is assuming that an address of 10.0.0.1 will always work in all situations. From the limited information provided, it appears he is using his laptop in a Border's cafe which is exposing a 10.0.0.0/24 private subnet. While the addressing used may work in this specific Border's, it is not guaranteed to work in all coffee shops. I would recommend reading RFC1918 as well as Wikipedia's beginning article on private networks to provide introductory background on such addressing. The larger issue which needs to be explored & studied is general IP addressing including subnetting. Wikipedia has an article on this as well. Note that this is simply introductory information for the uninitiated. More in depth tutorials & books need to be read in order to thoroughly master the subject. Understanding this topic is highly recommended if you continue to use OpenBSD in networked situations.

Note that 10.0.0.0/8 (classful) is typically referred in in private addressing discussions. Apparently, this particular Border's is further subnetting this down to a /24 private network which isn't altogether surprising, but getting this information would require talking to the in-house staff. Perhaps all Border's expose this specific private subnet, but the point to be taken away from this message is that such a decision is not dictated by IP addressing; rather if such an exposure is widely used, it is as a arbitrary corporate convention.

It is good tetrodozombie figured out his own configuration issues. OpenBSD is a small project, & much of the support infrastructure found in larger, more established comunities such as Windows & Linux will likely never be as pervasive or complete for the OpenBSD community. Learning to critically read & understand what information is available (manpages + FAQ + mailing lists) is necessary to use the operating system effectively.

2 -- explaination: nwid -> is the network id or network alias name of burger king or mcdonald's the place that's giving you free wifi. nwkey is the hexadecimal key which always begins with 0x and is followed by six digits or letters from a - f. Here at this hotel it's the pass key. the 255.255.255.0 is your netmask if you're using DHCP and you prolly are if you're using free wifi. you can put NONE after the netmask and ifconfig if give you what that NONE paramter is automatically. I forgot what it's for, but since I found the work around I'm not buggin.

3 -- wait and watch your light start to blink on your usb network adapter. when it stops blinking and stays on, you've got an active connection to the network you're trying to reach or the nwid. (( this is the part that got me. i didn't know you had to wait for like 30 seconds to have the network connection become solid. it's not an instantaneous thing. ))

4 (for i just use this one simple line in my /etc/hostname.urtw0 :

dhcp

( that's it )

now, at the command prompt type:

sudo dhclient urtw0

it will look for a lease from the network nwid for about 1 - 20 seconds and tell you it recieved an offer. if you do a 'ifconfig urtw0' you should see "active" somewhere in all that.

start up X windows using your favorite wm and you're surfing the web like i am right now with your openbsd box.

Here's something cool to remember and think about. After you do this and get comfortable with ifconfig, there are some cool things you can do with it like TUNNELING. And, I think my friends the internet just opens up a little bit more than
it did the day before yesterday.

Let me say I don't think anyone should ever use a tool like "ifconfig" and not be intimately familar with it and all it can do. For anyone who wants to get on the fast track to learning internet fundamentals and the ins and outs of Unix, you gotta know ifconfig like it's the back of your hand. This is the one tool I see that will enable you to be a proficient hacker or awsome sys admin if that's what you want to be. Plan on reading the terrific OpenBSD man page on ifconfig for about a month while you're debugging your usb network adapter. Expect to spend about a month learning how to use ifconfig and dhclient to get on the web. The experience will be worth the wait because you will start to understand how that Unix box works. You'll start to become familar with the capabilities of network command line tools.

You could cheet and use a GUI. But, you'll always be dependent on someone else's knowledge, expertise, yada, yada, yada. To be really good, you have to work at it.